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It was Mytilene’s (Lesbos) karma, I thought, from the beginning of the refugee crisis, to become the portal for the whole tragic flood of humanity that’s entering Europe right now. At the time of the ugly and brutal Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey of their respective minorities that was decided by the Treaty of Lausanne and began in 1923, Mytilene was the only Greek island off the Aegean coast that had a large number of Muslims, probably more then one quarter of its population. Chios (Sakız), and Samos had very few, almost none in the case of Samos, while the islands further south, the Dodecanese, had already been given to the Italians by the victorious Entente/Allies and so the ancestors of the some 5,000 Turks (Greece’s Turkish minority that we tend to forget about) that still live in Kos and Rhodes were exempt.

Across exactly from Mytilene is the Turkish town of Ayvali (Ayvalık). Ayvali was one of those products of the Ottomans’ improvisatory policies for managing the multiple ethnic and religious corporate groups that constituted the empire, and usually worked; in the 18th century, the coast of the Anatolian Aegean being underpopulated and underutilized economically, a grant was given to Greeks to settle there that didn’t just encourage Greeks, but excluded Muslims from settling there, to make the area even more attractive for Greek settlers.*

And very soon, Ayvali grew, out of its seafaring activities and the fertility of its hinterland, into a prosperous and what is, architecturally, still a beautiful small Greek city, the object of much nostalgia in the Greek genre of Anatolian martyrology, but more, the symbol of what Patricia Storace calls “the voluptuous domesticity” that Greeks associate with their former paradisiacal life on the Aegean coast.

[It’s also made Ayvali, the neighbouring island of Cunda, Tenedos and Imvros to some extent, newly fashionable for White Turk hipster tourists, since their parents’ generation didn’t get a chance to turn it all into Bodrum or Benidorm. They’re the Aegean coast equivalent of Pera/Karaköy and like neighborhoods in Istanbul.]

So the two regions came to fit into each other like a Yin/Yang symbol, and when the Exchange came, most Ayvali Greeks were settled in Mytilene, while the Turks of the island were shipped just across the water – the often treacherous channel were so many refugees today have drowned (it’s a great error – popular and tourist-based — to see the Aegean as a benign sea), and settled in Ayvali and its neighboring villages.**

Mytilenioi, a population of around 80,000, in a country sunk into the deepest economic pit of any country in the European Union, have seen over 400,000 refugees pass through their island in 2015. And yet, despite a few outbreaks, the islanders’ acceptance of this flood of humanity has been exemplary: full of patience, humanity and humor even – as Roger Cohen reported: “Battered Greece and Its Refugee Lesson“ — with a deep empathy that I had thought from the beginning was due partly to so many of the islanders’ descent – only one or two generations – from refugees themselves.

When I’d say so here in Greece, many responded to me with the usual Greek cynicism: our deepest, most tragic flaw, that no one is ever doing anything in good faith. Yet at least one Greek journalist and blogger, Michalis Gelasakis,had the same idea, posting this photo of old Greek women on Mytilene cradling and feeding the baby of a Syrian refugee woman:

“Grandmothers in Mytilene feed the baby of a refugee woman. Likely themselves to have arrived like this in North-East Coast of the island.”

And now, to confirm my own sentiments, comes this stunning article, “Be like Water” in Guernica by Annia Ciezadlo, a Beirut-based journalist, that weaves together the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange, Indian Partition, Mytilene’s place in the current refugee crisis, Homer and ancient concepts of hospitality, all in one tender, moving piece:

“Philoxenia: love for the stranger, the traveler, the guest. Who might be a god or goddess in disguise. Or Odysseus, returning from his travels in the guise of a beggar in order to test the loyalties of his servants.”

“Old man, the dogs were likely to have made short work of you, and then you would have got me into trouble. The gods have given me quite enough worries without that, for I have lost the best of masters, and am in continual grief on his account. I have to attend swine for other people to eat, while he, if he yet lives to see the light of day, is starving in some distant land. But come inside, and when you have had your fill of bread and wine, tell me where you come from, and all about your misfortunes.”[My emphasis]

—Eumaeus, the Syrian [how did she find this idea?], to the disguised Odysseus; The Odyssey, Book 14

I know that the people of Mytilene – and their “philoxenia” or even more, their “philotimo,***” have done us proud as Greeks, and deserve a collective Nobel peace prize for 2015, while the rest of Europe has acted more like Eumaeus’ dogs.

* Yeah, the Ottomans did odd shit like this, to keep everybody happy and for the most part it worked. Like Ayvali and its environs, for example, in Istanbul in the 17th century the Porte granted the mostly Chian shipyard workers from the tershana in Hasköy on the Golden Horn/Keratio, the right to establish a village around the pre-existent shrine of St. Demetrios on the hilltop which the gulley up through Dolapdere led to, and where no Muslims, weirdly, were allowed to settle. This was the nucleus out of which the legendary Greek neighborhood of Tatavla grew, and which, due to its rough, working class character, was an intimidating place for Muslims to enter until the end of the Empire. Except for its famous Carnival, when everyone was allowed.

The same would happen in highland regions of Greece, Epiros especially — where remittances from emigrant locals provided the wealth to pay for it — where autonomous privileges were bought from the Ottoman authorities in return for a modest amount of self-government and the right to not have Muslims settle there and not be subject to Islamic proselytizing of any sort — violent or otherwise. “…και παππού σε μέρη αυτόνομα μέσα στην τουρκοκρατία…” asSavvopoulos once sang.

** The truth is that refugees from neighboring Mytilene were probably outnumbered by Cretan Turks in Ayvali, like along much of the Aegean coast left empty by departing Greeks, along with Ayvali, Smyrna itself and the neighboring peninsula of Karaburna. The irony here is that many of the Mytilene Turks that came were Turkish-speaking, while the massive flood of Cretan Turks spoke Greek, so that much of the Aegean coast remained Greek-speaking, albeit Greek of a markedly different dialect, until a couple of generations or so ago. And despite the disappearance of the language, of all the Turkish exchangees, it’s Cretan Turks who have most preserved a solid identity and group consciousness.

*** Philotimo: a complex word I’ll have to explain in another post, though I give it a go here:

“Honor” is a bad translation for “φιλότιμo,” which means honor and amour propre and sense of dignity and reciprocity, all in one complex structure of emotions and social acts. Basically, “philotimo” is the sense of self-respect that’s intimately tied up with the upholding of your obligations to others that held Greeks together for centuries. All readers here know I’m a fanatic opponent of reading Classicizing virtues – or Classical anything — into Neo-Greek society, but the importance of “philotimo,” I feel, even if just discursive, even if only in its lapses, is a millennia-long constant.

From Bosnia to Bengal – the purpose of this blog

I'm Nicholas Bakos, a.k.a. "NikoBako." I'm Greek (Roman really, but only a handful of people today fully understand what I'm talking about when I say that, so I use "Greek" for shorthand). I'm from New York. I live all over the place these days. The rest should become obvious from the blog.